How far Americans would go to fight terror

In presenting four extreme scenarios, the poll provides a gauge for measuring how serious Americans are about winning. The most acceptable: assassinations, with 60 percent saying they "could envision a scenario in which they would support" the tactic; 35 percent could not.

In 1981, by contrast, a Gallup poll found that 82 percent said they could never support political assassinations. That was after a decade of widespread criticism of the CIA for promoting that tactic in Central and South America - and President Ford's 1976 executive order banning US involvement in political assassinations.

Indeed, lack of historical perspective may be one reason younger people are more accepting of government-sanctioned assassinations: Support among 18- to 24-year-olds is 65 percent, compared with 56 percent among those 65 and over.

"I think you have to take these people out," says Keith Malinak, a 20-something Texan, about terrorism supporters like Iraq's Saddam Hussein. He knows there may be consequences. "If that means a wider war, that means a wider war," he says with a resigned air. But "this country has a history of doing what's necessary to win wars."

One difference between the 1980s and today is a more concrete threat. "We disapprove of assassinations in principle," but when a specific opponent - such as bin Laden - becomes sufficiently menacing, "we approve of it right away," says Sheldon Appleton, a political scientist at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. It's the tension, he says, between maintaining high principles and wanting to protect ourselves.

Yet even today, not everyone is convinced: 53 percent of women and 68 percent of men back assassinations - a 15-point spread. Also, 54 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Republicans could support them.

Next on the most-acceptable list is torture of suspects, which 32 percent support.

Finally, 27 percent could support using nuclear weapons, compared with just 10 percent for use of chemical or biological weapons - even though nuclear weapons are typically far more destructive. Observers attribute the gap to the menacing image of biological and chemical weapons - as used by Saddam Hussein in Iraq or in the recent anthrax attacks here. Nuclear weapons, by contrast, are a more distant memory, having been used in the 1940s in the US attacks on Japan that killed about 200,000 people.

Debates over all the tactics represent a national soul-searching over how to fight a just war.

The question for a nation defending itself and its Western ideals is: "How do you get a good result to come out of a bad thing - war?" says Michael Birkner, a historian at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. "We have to weigh it all, and ask, 'Do the ends justify the means?' "

Seth Stern contributed to this report.

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